During the taking of the Taku forts he carried scaling ladders at the heads of the storming columns and planted them against the walls.  He did this, not from a sense of patriotism, but for the invading foreign devils because they paid him a daily wage of fifty cents.  He is not frightened by war.  He accepts it as he does rain and sunshine, the changing of the seasons, and other natural phenomena.  He prepares for it, endures it, and survives it, and when the tide of battle sweeps by, the thunder of the guns still reverberating in the distant canyons, he is seen calmly bending to his usual tasks.  Nay, war itself bears fruits whereof he may pick.  Before the dead are cold or the burial squads have arrived he is out on the field, stripping the mangled bodies, collecting the shrapnel, and ferreting in the shell holes for slivers and fragments of iron.

The Chinese is no coward.  He does not carry away his doors amid windows to the mountains, but remains to guard them when alien soldiers occupy his town.  He does not hide away his chickens and his eggs, nor any other commodity he possesses.  He proceeds at once to offer them for sale.  Nor is he to be bullied into lowering his price.  What if the purchaser be a soldier and an alien made cocky by victory and confident by overwhelming force?  He has two large pears saved over from last year which he will sell for five sen, or for the same price three small pears.  What if one soldier persist in taking away with him three large pears?  What if there be twenty other soldiers jostling about him?  He turns over his sack of fruit to another Chinese and races down the street after his pears and the soldier responsible for their flight, and he does not return till he has wrenched away one large pear from that soldier’s grasp.

Nor is the Chinese the type of permanence which he has been so often designated.  He is not so ill-disposed toward new ideas and new methods as his history would seem to indicate.  True, his forms, customs, and methods have been permanent these many centuries, but this has been due to the fact that his government was in the hands of the learned classes, and that these governing scholars found their salvation lay in suppressing all progressive ideas.  The ideas behind the Boxer troubles and the outbreaks over the introduction of railroad and other foreign devil machinations have emanated from the minds of the literati, and been spread by their pamphlets and propagandists.

Originality and enterprise have been suppressed in the Chinese for scores of generations.  Only has remained to him industry, and in this has he found the supreme expression of his being.  On the other hand, his susceptibility to new ideas has been well demonstrated wherever he has escaped beyond the restrictions imposed upon him by his government.  So far as the business man is concerned he has grasped far more clearly the Western code of business, the Western